One of the best known Indian fighters in Kentucky was William Whitley, who lived at Walnut Flat, some five miles from Crab Orchard.  He had come to Kentucky soon after its settlement, and by his energy and ability had acquired property and leadership, though of unknown ancestry and without education.  He was a stalwart man, skilled in the use of arms, jovial and fearless; the backwoods fighters followed him readily, and he loved battle; he took part in innumerable Indian expeditions, and in his old age was killed fighting against Tecumseh at the battle of the Thames.  In 1786 or ’87 he built the first brick house ever built in Kentucky.  It was a very handsome house for those days, every step in the hall stairway having carved upon it the head of an eagle bearing in its beak an olive branch.  Each story was high, and the windows were placed very high from the ground, to prevent the Indians from shooting through them at the occupants.  The glass was brought from Virginia by pack train.  He feasted royally the hands who put up the house; and to pay for the whiskey they drank he had to sell one of his farms.

In 1785 (the year of the above recited ravages on the upper Ohio in the neighborhood of Wheeling), Colonel Whitley led his rangers, once and again, against marauding Indians.  In January he followed a war party, rescued a captive white man, and took prisoner an Indian who was afterwards killed by one of the militia—­“a cowardly fellow,” says Whitley.  In October a party of immigrants, led by a man named McClure, who had just come over the Wilderness trace, were set upon at dawn by Indians, not far from Whitley’s house; two of the men were killed.  Mrs. McClure got away at first, and ran two hundred yards, taking her four children with her; in the gloom they would all have escaped had not the smallest child kept crying.  This led the Indians to them.  Three of the children were tomahawked at once; next morning the fourth shared the same fate.  The mother was forced to cook breakfast for her captors at the fire before which the scalps were drying.  She was then placed on a half-broken horse and led off with them.  When word of the disaster was brought to Whitley’s, he was not at home, but his wife, a worthy helpmeet, immediately sent for him, and meanwhile sent word to his company.  On his return he was able to take the trail at once with twenty-one riflemen, as true as steel.  Following hard, but with stealth equal to their own, he overtook the Indians at sundown on the second day, and fell on them in their camp.  Most of them escaped through the thick forest, but he killed two, rescued six prisoners, and captured sixteen horses and much plunder.